Washington Square (13 page)

C
HAPTER
24

The doctor, during the first six months he was abroad, never spoke to his daughter of their little difference, partly on system, and partly because he had a great many other things to think about. It was idle to attempt to ascertain the state of her affections without direct inquiry, because if she had not had an expressive manner among the familiar influences of home, she failed to gather animation from the mountains of Switzerland or the monuments of Italy. She was always her father's docile and reasonable associate—going through their sight-seeing in deferential silence, never complaining of fatigue, always ready to start at the hour he had appointed overnight, making no foolish criticisms, and indulging in no refinements of appreciation. “She is about as intelligent as the bundle of shawls,” the doctor said, her main superiority being that, while the bundle of shawls sometimes got lost, or tumbled out of the carriage, Catherine was always at her post, and had a firm and ample seat. But her father had expected this, and he was not constrained to set down her intellectual limitations as a tourist to sentimental depression; she had completely divested herself of the characteristics of a victim, and during the whole time that they were abroad she never uttered an audible sigh. He supposed she was in correspondence with Morris Townsend, but he held his peace about it, for he never saw the young man's letters, and Catherine's own missives were always given to the courier to post. She heard from her lover with considerable regularity, but his letters came enclosed in Mrs. Penniman's; so that, whenever the doctor handed her a packet addressed in his sister's hand, he was an involuntary instrument of the passion he condemned. Catherine made this reflection, and six months earlier she would have felt bound to give him warning; but now she deemed herself absolved. There was a sore spot in her heart that his own words had made when once she spoke to him as she thought honor prompted; she would try and please him as far as she could, but she would never speak that way again. She read her lover's letters in secret.

One day, at the end of the summer, the two travelers found themselves in a lonely valley of the Alps. They were crossing one of the passes, and on the long ascent they had got out of the carriage and had wandered much in advance. After awhile the doctor descried a footpath which, leading through a traverse valley, would bring them out, as he justly supposed, at a much higher point of the ascent. They followed this devious way, and finally lost the path; the valley proved very wild and rough, and their walk became rather a scramble. They were good walkers, however, and they took their adventure easily; from time to time they stopped, that Catherine might rest; and then she sat upon a stone and looked about her at the hard-featured rocks and the glowing sky. It was late in the afternoon, in the last of August; night was coming on, and as they had reached a great elevation, the air was cold and sharp. In the west there was a great suffusion of cold red light, which made the sides of the little valley look only the more rugged and dusky. During one of their pauses her father left her and wandered away to some high place, at a distance, to get a view. He was out of sight; she sat there alone in the stillness, which was just touched by the vague murmur somewhere of a mountain brook. She thought of Morris Townsend, and the place was so desolate and lonely that he seemed very far away. Her father remained absent a long time; she began to wonder what had become of him. But at last he reappeared, coming toward her in the clear twilight, and she got up to go on. He made no motion to proceed, however, but came close to her, as if he had something to say. He stopped in front of her, and stood looking at her with eyes that had kept the light of the flushing snow-summits on which they had just been fixed. Then, abruptly, in a low tone, he asked her an unexpected question, “Have you given him up?”

The question was unexpected, but Catherine was only superficially unprepared.

“No, Father,” she answered.

He looked at her again for some moments without speaking.

“Does he write to you?” he asked.

“Yes, about twice a month.”

The doctor looked up and down the valley, swinging his stick; then he said to her, in the same low tone, “I am very angry.”

She wondered what he meant—whether he wished to frighten her. If he did, the place was well chosen: This hard, melancholy dell, abandoned by the summer light, made her feel her loneliness. She looked around her, and her heart grew cold; for a moment her fear was great. But she could think of nothing to say, save to murmur, gently, “I am sorry.”

“You try my patience,” her father went on, “and you ought to know what I am. I am not a very good man. Though I am very smooth externally, at bottom I am very passionate; and I assure you I can be very hard.”

She could not think why he told her these things. Had he brought her there on purpose, and was it part of a plan? What was the plan? Catherine asked herself. Was it to startle her suddenly into a retraction—to take an advantage of her by dread? Dread of what? The place was ugly and lonely, but the place could do her no harm. There was a kind of still intensity about her father which made him dangerous, but Catherine hardly went so far as to say to herself that it might be part of his plan to fasten his hand—the neat, fine, supple hand of a distinguished physician—in her throat. Nevertheless, she receded a step. “I am sure you can be anything you please,” she said; and it was her simple belief.

“I am very angry,” he replied, more sharply.

“Why has it taken you so suddenly?”

“It has not taken me suddenly. I have been raging inwardly for the last six months. But just now this seemed a good place to flare out. It's so quiet, and we are alone.”

“Yes, it's very quiet,” said Catherine, vaguely looking about her. “Won't you come back to the carriage?”

“In a moment. Do you mean that in all this time you have not yielded an inch?”

“I would if I could, Father; but I can't.”

The doctor looked round him too. “Should you like to be left in such a place as this, to starve?”

“What do you mean?” cried the girl.

“That will be your fate—that's how he will leave you.”

He would not touch her, but he had touched Morris. The warmth came back to her heart. “That is not true, Father,” she broke out, “and you ought not to say it. It is not right, and it's not true.”

He shook his head slowly. “No, it's not right, because you won't believe it. But it
is
true. Come back to the carriage.”

He turned away, and she followed him; he went faster, and was presently much in advance. But from time to time he stopped, without turning round, to let her keep up with him, and she made her way forward with difficulty, her heart beating with the excitement of having for the first time spoken to him in violence. By this time it had grown almost dark, and she ended by losing sight of him. But she kept her course, and after a while, the valley making a sudden turn, she gained the road, where the carriage stood waiting. In it sat her father, rigid and silent; in silence, too, she took her place beside him.

It seemed to her, later, in looking back upon all this, that for days afterward not a word had been exchanged between them. The scene had been a strange one, but it had not permanently affected her feeling toward her father, for it was natural, after all, that he should occasionally make a scene of some kind, and he had let her alone for six months. The strangest part of it was that he had said he was not a good man; Catherine wondered a good deal what he had meant by that. The statement failed to appeal to her credence, and it was not grateful to any resentment that she entertained. Even in the utmost bitterness that she might feel, it would give her no satisfaction to think him less complete. Such a saying as that was a part of his great subtlety—men so clever as he might say anything and mean anything; and as to his being hard, that surely, in a man, was a virtue.

He let her alone for six months more—six months during which she accommodated herself without a protest to the extension of their tour. But he spoke again at the end of this time: It was at the very last, the night before they embarked for New York, in the hotel at Liverpool. They had been dining together in a great, dim, musty sitting room; and then the cloth had been removed, and the doctor walked slowly up and down. Catherine at last took her candle to go to bed, but her father motioned her to stay.

“What do you mean to do when you get home?” he asked, while she stood there with her candle in her hand.

“Do you mean about Mr. Townsend?”

“About Mr. Townsend.”

“We shall probably marry.”

The doctor took several turns again while she waited. “Do you hear from him as much as ever?”

“Yes, twice a month,” said Catherine, promptly.

“And does he always talk about marriage?”

“Oh yes; that is, he talks about other things too, but he always says something about that.”

“I am glad to hear he varies his subjects; his letters might otherwise be monotonous.”

“He writes beautifully,” said Catherine, who was very glad of a chance to say it.

“They always write beautifully. However, in a given case that doesn't diminish the merit. So, as soon as you arrive, you are going off with him?”

This seemed a rather gross way of putting it, and something that there was of dignity in Catherine resented it. “I cannot tell you till we arrive,” she said.

“That's reasonable enough,” her father answered. “That's all I ask of you—that you
do
tell me, that you give me definite notice. When a poor man is to lose his only child, he likes to have an inkling of it beforehand.”

“Oh, Father, you will not lose me,” Catherine said, spilling her candle wax.

“Three days before will do,” he went on, “if you are in a position to be positive then. He ought to be very thankful to me, do you know. I have done a mighty good thing for him in taking you abroad; your value is twice as great, with all the knowledge and taste that you have acquired. A year ago, you were perhaps a little limited—a little rustic; but now you have seen everything, and appreciated everything, and you will be a most entertaining companion. We have fattened the sheep for him before he kills it.” Catherine turned away, and stood staring at the blank door. “Go to bed,” said her father, “and as we don't go aboard till noon, you may sleep late. We shall probably have a most uncomfortable voyage.”

C
HAPTER
25

The voyage was indeed uncomfortable, and Catherine, on arriving in New York, had not the compensation of “going off,” in her father's phrase, with Morris Townsend. She saw him, however, the day after she landed; and in the meantime he formed a natural subject of conversation between our heroine and her aunt Lavinia, with whom, the night she disembarked, the girl was closeted for a long time before either lady retired to rest.

“I have seen a great deal of him,” said Mrs. Penniman. “He is not very easy to know. I suppose you think you know him; but you don't, my dear. You will someday; but it will only be after you have lived with him. I may almost say
I
have lived with him,” Mrs. Penniman proceeded, while Catherine stared. “I think I know him now; I have had such remarkable opportunities. You will have the same—or, rather, you will have better,” and Aunt Lavinia smiled. “Then you will see what I mean. It's a wonderful character, full of passion and energy, and just as true.”

Catherine listened with a mixture of interest and apprehension. Aunt Lavinia was intensely sympathetic, and Catherine, for the past year, while she wandered through foreign galleries and churches, and rolled over the smoothness of posting roads, nursing the thoughts that never passed her lips, had often longed for the company of some intelligent person of her own sex. To tell her story to some kind woman—at moments it seemed to her that this would give her comfort, and she had more than once been on the point of taking the landlady, or the nice young person from the dressmaker's, into her confidence. If a woman had been near her, she would on certain occasions have treated such a companion to a fit of weeping; and she had an apprehension that, on her return, this would form her response to Aunt Lavinia's first embrace. In fact, however, the two ladies had met, in Washington Square, without tears; and when they found themselves alone together a certain dryness fell upon the girl's emotion. It came over her with a greater force that Mrs. Penniman had enjoyed a whole year of her lover's society, and it was not a pleasure to her to hear her aunt explain and interpret the young man, speaking of him as if her own knowledge of him were supreme. It was not that Catherine was jealous; but her sense of Mrs. Penniman's innocent falsity, which had lain dormant, began to haunt her again, and she was glad that she was safely at home. With this, however, it was a blessing to be able to talk of Morris, to sound his name, to be with a person who was not unjust to him.

“You have been very kind to him,” said Catherine. “He has written me that, often. I shall never forget that, Aunt Lavinia.”

“I have done what I could; it has been very little. To let him come and talk to me, and give him his cup of tea—that was all. Your aunt Almond thought it was too much, and used to scold me terribly; but she promised me, at least, not to betray me.”

“To betray you?”

“Not to tell your father. He used to sit in your father's study,” said Mrs. Penniman, with a little laugh.

Catherine was silent a moment. This idea was disagreeable to her, and she was reminded again, with pain, of her aunt's secretive habits. Morris, the reader may be informed, had had the tact not to tell her that he sat in her father's study. He had known her but for a few months, and her aunt had known her for fifteen years; and yet he would not have made the mistake of thinking that Catherine would see the joke of the thing. “I am sorry you made him go into Father's room,” she said, after awhile.

“I didn't send him; he went himself. He liked to look at the books, and at all those things in the glass cases. He knows all about them; he knows all about everything.”

Catherine was silent again; then, “I wish he had found some employment,” she said.

“He has found some employment. It's beautiful news, and he told me to tell you as soon as you arrived. He has gone into partnership with a commission merchant. It was all settled, quite suddenly, a week ago.”

This seemed to Catherine indeed beautiful news; it had a fine prosperous air. “Oh, I'm so glad!” she said; and now, for a moment, she was disposed to throw herself on Aunt Lavinia's neck.

“It's much better than being under someone; and he has never been used to that,” Mrs. Penniman went on. “He is just as good as his partner—they are perfectly equal. You see how right he was to wait. I should like to know what your father can say now! They have got an office in Duane Street, and little printed cards; he brought me one to show me. I have got it in my room, and you shall see it tomorrow. That's what he said to me the last time he was here, ‘You see how right I was to wait.' He has got other people under him instead of being a subordinate. He could never be a subordinate; I have often told him I could never think of him in that way.”

Catherine assented to this proposition, and was very happy to know that Morris was his own master; but she was deprived of the satisfaction of thinking that she might communicate this news in triumph to her father. Her father would care equally little whether Morris were established in business or transported for life. Her trunks had been brought into her room, and further reference to her lover was for a short time suspended, while she opened them and displayed to her aunt some of the spoils of foreign travel. These were rich and abundant; and Catherine had brought home a present to everyone—to everyone save Morris, to whom she had brought simply her undiverted heart. To Mrs. Penniman she had been lavishly generous, and Aunt Lavinia spent half an hour unfolding and folding again, with little ejaculations of gratitude and taste. She marched about for some time in a splendid cashmere shawl, which Catherine had begged her to accept, settling it on her shoulders, and twisting down her head to see how low the point descended behind.

“I shall regard it only as a loan,” she said. “I will leave it to you again when I die; or, rather,” she added, kissing her niece again, “I will leave it to your firstborn little girl.” And draped in her shawl, she stood there smiling.

“You had better wait till she comes,” said Catherine.

“I don't like the way you say that,” Mrs. Penniman rejoined, in a moment. “Catherine, are you changed?”

“No; I am the same.”

“You have not swerved a line?”

“I am exactly the same,” Catherine repeated, wishing her aunt were a little less sympathetic.

“Well, I am glad,” and Mrs. Penniman surveyed her cashmere in the glass. Then, “How is your father?” she asked, in a moment, with her eyes on her niece. “Your letters were so meager—I could never tell.”

“Father is very well.”

“Ah, you know what I mean,” said Mrs. Penniman, with a dignity to which the cashmere gave a richer effect. “Is he still implacable?”

“Oh yes!”

“Quite unchanged?”

“He is, if possible, more firm.”

Mrs. Penniman took off her great shawl, and slowly folded it up. “That is very bad. You had no success with your little project?”

“What little project?”

“Morris told me all about it. The idea of turning the tables on him, in Europe; of watching him, when he was agreeably impressed by some celebrated sight—he pretends to be so artistic, you know—and then just pleading with him and bringing him round.”

“I never tried it. It was Morris's idea; but if he had been with us in Europe, he would have seen that Father was never impressed in that way. He
is
artistic—tremendously artistic; but the more celebrated places we visited, and the more he admired them, the less use it would have been to plead with him. They seemed only to make him more determined—more terrible,” said poor Catherine. “I shall never bring him round, and I expect nothing now.”

“Well, I must say,” Mrs. Penniman answered, “I never supposed you were going to give it up.”

“I have given it up. I don't care now.”

“You have grown very brave,” said Mrs. Penniman, with a short laugh. “I didn't advise you to sacrifice your property.”

“Yes, I am braver than I was. You asked me if I had changed; I have changed in that way. Oh,” the girl went on, “I have changed very much. And it isn't my property. If
he
doesn't care for it, why should I?”

Mrs. Penniman hesitated. “Perhaps he does care for it.”

“He cares for it for my sake, because he doesn't want to injure me. But he will know—he knows already—how little he need be afraid about that. Besides,” said Catherine, “I have got plenty of money of my own. We shall be very well off; and now hasn't he got his business? I am delighted about that business.” She went on talking, showing a good deal of excitement as she proceeded. Her aunt had never seen her with just this manner, and Mrs. Penniman, observing her, set it down to foreign travel, which had made her more positive, more mature. She thought also that Catherine had improved in appearance; she looked rather handsome. Mrs. Penniman wondered whether Morris Townsend would be struck with that. While she was engaged in this speculation, Catherine broke out, with a certain sharpness, “Why are you so contradictory, Aunt Penniman? You seem to think one thing at one time, and another at another. A year ago, before we went away, you wished me not to mind about displeasing Father, and now you seem to recommend me to take another line. You change about so.”

This attack was unexpected, for Mrs. Penniman was not used, in any discussion, to seeing the war carried into her own country—possibly because the enemy generally had doubts of finding subsistence there. To her own consciousness, the flowery fields of her reason had rarely been ravaged by a hostile force. It was perhaps on this account that in defending them she was majestic rather than agile.

“I don't know what you accuse me of, save of being too deeply interested in your happiness. It is the first time I have been told I am capricious. That fault is not what I am usually reproached with.”

“You were angry last year that I wouldn't marry immediately, and now you talk about my winning my father over. You told me it would serve him right if he should take me to Europe for nothing. Well, he has taken me for nothing, and you ought to be satisfied. Nothing is changed—nothing but my feeling about Father. I don't mind nearly so much now. I have been as good as I could, but he doesn't care. Now I don't care either. I don't know whether I have grown bad; perhaps I have. But I don't care for that. I have come home to be married—that's all I know. That ought to please you, unless you have taken up some new idea; you are so strange. You may do as you please, but you must never speak to me again about pleading with Father. I shall never plead with him for anything; that is all over. He has put me off. I am come home to be married.”

This was a more authoritative speech than she had ever heard on her niece's lips, and Mrs. Penniman was proportionately startled. She was, indeed, a little awestruck, and the force of the girl's emotion and resolution left her nothing to reply. She was easily frightened, and she always carried off her discomfiture by a concession—a concession which was often accompanied, as in the present case, by a little nervous laugh.